Hugo Williams

Piers are stepping-stonesout of this world, a line of poetryflung out to sea on a whim,a dazzle of sea lightsglimpsed between floorboards.

For 50p you can study eternitythrough a telescopeand never have to go there,only promenade to nowhere and backin an atmosphere of ice cream

We used to take the speedboat ridebetween the two piers,pulling the canvas up to our chinswhen the spray flew in our...

Days move diagonally across town, meet other days travelling in the opposite direction. Let off the leash, I was roaming the streets after dark, looking for a thread among neon petals splashing in gutters,

when the screech of brakes heralded my destruction. How kind of someone, I thought, to consider de-accelerating on my behalf, no matter that the gesture came too late to save my life. The...

I read the news today, oh boy, About a lucky man who made the grade.

The Beatles, ‘A Day in the Life’

If you’d apologised just once for green shirts and amethyst cuff-links you might have survived, but who would have believed that Irish-ironical ‘Sorrry, sorrry’ as you fell about laughing? You were only fifteen when we followed you across Paris after midnight,...

The gradual disappearance of one familiar face after another, to Manchester, or Ibiza, or the ominous-sounding ‘New Zealand’, fills the screen with ghosts, who seem to exist in happier times.

The reason for their absence, on holiday, or honeymoon, or merely ‘steering clear of the Filth’ in Southend or the Algarve, seems fair enough at the time and the story carries...

Do you drop things? Do you trip and hurl cups of tea ahead of you, going upstairs? Do your possessions have a life of their own in which they dither idiotically on your fingertips, then make a sudden leap?

In a flash they find their new home in a dark corner of your room, a distant country. Your face turns red and your head swells up like a balloon as you make yourself bow down.

You see...